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Planetarium Sky Quiz Flashcards | Quizlet

Space is vast and filled with the unknown. Thus, scientists are continuously learning new things about it. If you’ve always been intrigued by space, or you simply wish to learn some interesting facts about it, I havecompiled a list of fascinating astronomy statistics to satisfy your curiosity. Astronomy is one of the oldest natural sciences. It studies celestial objects and phenomena like planets, moons, stars, galaxies, nebulae, and much more. By using mathematics, chemistry, and physics, astronomy strives to explain the origin of these celestial objects and their evolution.

   

Even though our solar system seems like a pretty big place, it represents only a tiny fraction of the entire universe. Scientists estimate that our galaxy has approximately 100 billion solar systems, and more than 125 billion galaxies exist in the universe. While many things about the universe are still unknown, scientists have learned quite a lot about all things outer space.

   

Scientists from various fields of astronomy use light-years to measure the distance between celestial objects. It is the distance light travels in an Earth year. Light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second (300,000 km/s), and one light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km). Since light needs so much time to reach us, whenever we are looking at celestial objects, we see them in the past. For example, the Sun is 8.3 light minutes away from us, so each time we look at it, we always see it as it was 8.3 minutes ago.

   

We all know that Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space, but did you know that the first woman in space was also Russian? Valentina Tereshkova flew into space on June 16, 1963, just two years after Gagarin. According to some rather interesting facts about astronomers, Tereshkova spent nearly three days in space and orbited Earth 48 times. Interestingly, before she was selected for the Soviet space program, Tereshkova was a textile factory worker and an amateur skydiver. To this day, she has remained the youngest woman who has gone to space on a solo mission.

   
As you can see, the universe is pretty gigantic, and even though we know a good deal about it, space still hides many mysteries. To learn more about it, scientists are continuously finding new ways to study the universe by improving existing technologies and creating new processes and software to understand the universe better. The universe hides millions more cool facts about stars, planets, and galaxies that we are yet to uncover. And while it can take years or even centuries before we can understand everything there is to know about the universe, one thing’s certain—space is simply awesome.